Scherner on Lindner, _Inside IG Farben: Hoechst during the Third Reich_

[Book Reviews in Economic and Business History]

Published by EH.NET (January 2009)

Stephan H. Lindner, _Inside IG Farben: Hoechst during the Third Reich_. 
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.  xx + 388 pp. $60 
(hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-521-88766-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Jonas Scherner, German Historical Institute, 
Washington DC.


In 1925, one of the largest industrial companies worldwide, the chemical 
giant IG Farben, was founded by a merger of several founder firms. This 
newly created company played an important role during the Nazi period 
because many goods produced by the firm were directly or indirectly 
indispensable for reaching the main economic aims of the Nazis -- 
self-sufficiency and re-armament. During the war, the company was 
heavily involved in the use of forced labor, especially the exploitation 
of concentration camp inmates while constructing the new plant at 
Auschwitz. Though the history of the IG Farben concern is examined in 
two important studies by Peter Hayes and Gottfried Plumpe, our knowledge 
of what was underway in the individual plants of this company -- plants 
which were able to retain a vast degree of autonomy -- is still small.

Stefan Lindner’s work focuses on one important plant of IG Farben, the 
Hoechst plant in Frankfurt, and spans the period from the merge to the 
dissolution of IG Farben in the early 1950s -- a dissolution pushed 
through by the western Allies in West Germany. The work is therefore, 
strictly speaking, not a business history but a history of a plant 
itself, and Lindner’s aim is to combine the macro-history of IG Farben 
with the micro-history of this plant. His main questions, aside from the 
description and analysis of the economic performance of this plant 
during the examined period, are to what extent Hoechst was linked to the 
Nazi regime -- its representatives and organizations -- and to what 
extent it was entangled or even actively involved in war crimes. His 
focus is not only on entanglements of individuals but also on the role 
the institutions themselves -- IG Farben and Hoechst -- played. In other 
words, the attitude towards various groups of employees is examined. One 
crucial matter here is whether competition spurred managers to think 
only in business terms and to repress any moral qualms.

In the first section of the work, Lindner shows Hoechst’s path into the 
IG Farben during the Weimar Republic. He explains how IG Farben’s first 
reforms and rationalization measures implemented during the 1920s and 
especially during the Great Depression, weakened the plant. Hoechst’s 
position within IG Farben was difficult from the onset due to its 
outdated production facilities and to managerial inability to form 
coalitions. In addition, its organization was also rather inefficient. 
The plant lost many products and even entire product lines because its 
management had taken no appropriate measures in the 1920s to cut the 
costs of production or to compete with the other IG Farben plants.

The core part of Lindner’s study focuses mainly on individuals and their 
social relationships by heavily employing the plant’s personnel files. 
He describes and analyzes the interaction of the NSDAP, the plant 
management, and the personnel. On this matter, he focuses specifically 
on the role -- and that role’s impact -- leading representatives of the 
plant played regarding the treatment of Jewish workers, as well as of 
foreign workers, during WWII.  Ludwig Hermann, who was appointed as the 
head of the Hoechst plant on January 1 1933, rejected the anti-Semitism 
of the Nazis, and as a committed Protestant, had serious reservations 
about the attempts to subordinate the Lutheran church to the influence 
of the National Socialists. In spite of his criticism of certain aspects 
of the Nazi ideology, Hermann was, nevertheless, not generally critical 
to Hitler or the Nazi regime and became a convinced supporter of Hitler 
and his politics. After his death in 1938, Carl Ludwig Lautenschlager 
was appointed as his successor. In contrast to Hermann, he was not only 
a convicted follower of the National Socialists and Hitler but was also 
strongly anti-Semitic. Under Lautenschlager, Hoechst became very 
compliant with the regime and its representatives. As Lindner shows 
convincingly, its behavior was in fact often more conformist than 
necessary. However, Lindner shows that the treatment of Jewish employees 
or employees of Jewish origin could differ considerably depending on the 
benefits the plant would receive from their work and if support for 
these employees was not to the detriment of the company. The dominance 
of economic goals in the plant’s behavior is also shown by the fact that 
Hoechst was directly involved in recruiting foreign workers by drawing 
up contracts with foreign companies. Thus, Hoechst was, by no means, 
merely a passive recipient of allocated foreign workers. Compulsion for 
Hoechst in foreign recruitment existed only insofar as the pursuit of 
its economic goals made the use of foreign workers necessary, but not in 
such a way that the company -- as the company’s lawyer claimed during 
the Nuremberg trials -- had been forced by official orders to employ them.

In the third section, Lindner examines Hoechst’s research and 
development as well as its production during the Nazi period. Though 
Hoechst was not a preeminent plant, it included important innovations 
during this period without forfeiting any existing ones. Hoechst worked, 
for instance, on drugs to diminish individual suffering. In this case, 
however, it took part in ghastly experiments conducted on concentration 
camp inmates. Interestingly enough, the person responsible for Hoechst’s 
involvement in this played an active role in the Catholic resistance 
movement against the Nazi regime. Lindner argues that it was not 
Hoechst’s ideological orientation that was responsible for this 
experimentation. Instead, economic aims were again predominant in making 
this decision.

The final section of the work explains how managers responsible during 
the first years after the war dealt with the Nazi past. Lindner argues 
that a highly efficient network of former IG managers existed, leading 
then to the rehiring of many of former IG employees, and that those, who 
for particular reasons could not be rehired, were at least funded 
financially.

In summary, Lindner’s study is an important contribution not only in 
understanding the undertakings of this single plant of the IG Farben 
concern. It is also, as a case study, a remarkably notable contribution 
to our knowledge of social relationships between managers and employees 
in German industry during the Third Reich. The work effectively portrays 
that, even under the conditions of the Third Reich, economic 
considerations predominantly shaped the decisions of the managers.


Jonas Scherner (Ph.D.) is a Research Fellow in Economic and Social 
History at the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington DC.   His 
recent publications include “The Beginnings of Nazi Autarky Policy: The 
National Pulp Programme and the Origin of Regional Staple Fibre Plants,” 
_Economic History Review_, 61: 4 (2008): 867-95 and _Die Logik der 
Industriepolitik im Dritten Reich: Die Investitionen in die Autarkie- 
und Rüstungsindustrie und ihre staatliche Förderung_, Franz Steiner 
Verlag: Stuttgart, 2008

Copyright (c) 2009 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be 
copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the 
author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net 
Administrator (administrator at eh.net). Published by EH.Net (January 
2009). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.